Oracle Tuxedo 12c App Server for C, C++ and COBOL Apps Ships

Oracle announced the release of Tuxedo 12c, the latest release of its application server for C, C++ and COBOL apps in the data center and in the cloud.

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Tuxedo 12c, the latest edition of the legacy application server for conventional and cloud-based C, C++ and COBOL applications.
The new release is optimized to run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and is tightly integrated with Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Oracle Tuxedo 12c is the first, major stable version of the Tuxedo technology in two years. Oracle Tuxedo 12c provides mainframe-class scalability and performance for mission-critical enterprise applications, and it introduces the new Oracle Tuxedo Message Queue 12c, which provides transaction management, enhanced performance and improved availability of enterprise messaging applications.

To meet the increasing demands of conventional and cloud-based applications, organizations need a modern and open platform that can deliver mainframe-class scale and performance, said Frank Xiong, vice president of software development at Oracle, in a statement. With Oracle Tuxedo 12c and the new and enhanced Oracle Tuxedo products, current and new customers can cost effectively take advantage of high-performing business-critical applications to increase productivity and reduce costs. In addition, the optimized integration between Oracle Tuxedo 12c and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, provides tremendous improvements in application performance, elastic scalability to accommodate load fluctuations and simplified provisioning delivered in a cloud environment.

Tuxedo was initially developed in the 1980s at AT&T as a transaction processing system. The initial name for the product was Transactions for UNIX, Extended for Distributed Operations, thus the acronym TUXEDO. Tuxedo was designed from the beginning for high availability and to provide extremely scalable applications to support applications requiring thousands of transactions per second on commonly available distributed systems. In 1993, AT&Ts original TUXEDO team went to Novell when Novell acquired AT&Ts Unix Systems Laboratories. In 1996, BEA Systems acquired the rights to develop and distribute Tuxedo on non-NetWare systems and much of the TUXEDO team went to BEA. Oracle acquired BEA in 2008 and placed Tuxedo into its Oracle Fusion Middleware family.
Tuxedo remains one of the best-performing TP monitors in the Unix space, but like CORBA [Common Object Request Broker Architecture] is primarily successful within its existing installed base, and gains few, if any, new customers, said Eric Newcomer, former chief architect at Credit Suisse. However, the customers using Tuxedo tend to use it for mission-critical applications that are often difficult, if not impossible, to replace. Yet, since WebLogic and Java EE became established as the more strategic enterprise computing platform, Tuxedo became positioned more and more as a C and/or C++ legacy environment. This, therefore, must be basically another maintenance release, with any new features designed for use by existing customers rather than new customers.
However, Oracle officials said Oracle Tuxedo 12c delivers innovative features, development tools and product enhancements to help lower the total cost of ownership of existing Tuxedo applications and reduce time-to-market for new application development. In addition, with the introduction of Oracle Tuxedo 12c, along with the new and enhanced Oracle Tuxedo products, Oracle offers a comprehensive solution for the development, rehosting and deployment of C/C++/COBOL applications in traditional data centers, engineered systems and enterprise clouds, the company said.

Moreover, this release also updates existing Oracle Tuxedo add-on products including: Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime 12c for CICS, IMS and Batch; Oracle Tuxedo Application Rehosting Workbench 12c);Oracle Tuxedo System and Application Monitor (TSAM) 12c; Oracle Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) 12c; Oracle Tuxedo JCA Adapter 12c;and Oracle Tuxedo Mainframe Adapters 12c.
Oracle Tuxedo 12c supports shared memory for inter-process communication and increases throughput by eight times and lowers response time by 80 percent for Oracle Tuxedo applications. The new version of Tuxedo also allows for optimized, co-existence of C, C++, COBOL, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby applications, and Oracle Tuxedo applications can be dynamically provisioned and deployed, and automatically scaled up or down within a private cloud environment.
Also, with business transaction monitoring for cross-product applications and the ability to run more than one version of the same application side-by-side, Oracle Tuxedo 12c reduces diagnostic time and allows application upgrades without system downtime, to help customers maintain a 24/7 operation schedule, Oracle said. And through an easy-to-use configuration tool for deploying Web services, Oracle Tuxedo 12c makes it easy to connect with third-party applications. In addition, it provides a configuration-only approach to access Oracle Tuxedo applications from Oracle SOA Suite through Java Connector Architecture- (JCA-) based integration.
Oracle Tuxedo on Oracle Exalogic provided better than expected performance for our GTX application, said Etienne Savatier, international sales and partnerships director at Sterci, in a statement. GTX is a mission-critical financial messaging application, which requires a high level of reliability and scalability. Oracle Tuxedo on Oracle Exalogic not only meets these requirements, this configuration also lowers overall TCO [total cost of ownership].
Meanwhile, AT&T Labs, which brought the world Unix and the C language, developed Tuxedo as a potential replacement for the IBM mainframe's IMS TP Monitor--on the assumption that UNIX was going to replace mainframes generally at AT&T and they would need a TP monitor for all their billing and operational applications on IMS, Newcomer said. BEA was originally established during the mid-90s TP wars to become the "Oracle of transaction processing," and eventually picked Tuxedo as their vehicle. Its success paralleled that of UNIX and became widely adopted as the independent TP monitor of choice for C and C++ based applications, added Newcomer, who is an expert on transaction processing and co-author of Principles of Transaction Processing.
Later, as Java began to emerge as an enterprise technology, BEA proposed a Java interface to Tuxedo simultaneously to their acquisition of WebLogic. After a few years it became clear that WebLogic would be the winner in the Java, Java EE (Enterprise Edition) race, and Tuxedo was positioned more and more as a legacy technology. BEA added CORBA support for it following the acquisition of ObjectBroker from Digital, but the so called "object-transaction monitor" or OTM approach also did not find broad success, Newcomer said.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.